Cassiodorus was a Roman statesman, great writer and (later) monk, serving in the administration of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths. He spent his career trying to bridge the cultural divides that were fragmenting the 6th century,...

After the repression of the frightful revolt, Justinian conceived the grandiose project of rebuilding the Great Church from its foundations. This time it was to be built on plans well in advance of the times, using new daring vaulting techn...

Saint Isidore of Seville served as Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades and is considered, as the 19th-century historian Montalembert put it in an oft-quoted phrase, "The last scholar of the ancient world".
At a time of disi...

Beowulf is an Old English epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative lines. It may be the oldest surviving long poem in Old English and is commonly cited as one of the most important works of Old English literature. A date of composition is...

A Cathedral dedicated to St Paul has overlooked the City of London since 604AD, a constant reminder to this great commercial centre of the importance of the spiritual side of life.
The current Cathedral – the fourth to occupy this site...

An-Nawawi's Forty Hadith: An Anthology of the Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. This collection of forty hadith by one of the most famous compilers of hadith is generally regarded as the most popular anthology and the best introduction to th...

The Leshan Giant Buddha is a 71-metre (233 ft) tall stone statue, built during the Tang Dynasty. It is carved out of a cliff face that lies at the confluence of the Minjiang, Dadu and Qingyi rivers in the southern part of Sichuan province i...

Angkor is a name conventionally applied to the region of Cambodia serving as the seat of the Khmer empire that flourished from approximately the ninth century to the fifteenth century A.D. More precisely, the Angkorian period may be defined...

The Historia Brittonum, or The History of the Britons, is a historical work that was first composed around 830, and exists in several recensions of varying difference. It purports to relate the history of the Brittonic inhabitants of Britai...

Al-Farabi was a renowned scientist and philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age. He was also a cosmologist, logician, and musician.
Through his commentaries and treatises, Al-Farabi became well known among medieval Muslim intellectuals as "...

Abu 'l-Qasim Ferdowsi Tusi, or Ferdowsi was a Persian poet and the author of Shahnameh ("Book of Kings"), which is the world's longest epic poem created by a single poet, and the national epic of Greater Iran.
Ferdowsi is celebrated as t...

Pope Sylvester II, born Gerbert d'Aurillac, was a prolific scholar, teacher, and Pope. He endorsed and promoted study of Arab/Greco-Roman arithmetic, mathematics, and astronomy, reintroducing to Europe the abacus and armillary sphere, which...

Sei Shonagon (lesser councilor of state Sei), was a Japanese author, poet and a court lady who served the Empress Teishi (Sadako) around the year 1000 during the middle Heian period. She is the author of The Pillow Book.
Shonagon is also...

Murasaki Shikibu (Lady Murasaki) (c.978–c.1014 or 1025) was a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court during the Heian period. She is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji, written in Japanese between about...

Guido of Arezzo (991/992 – after 1033) was a music theorist of the Medieval era. He is regarded as the inventor of modern musical notation (staff notation) that replaced neumatic notation; his text, the Micrologus, was the second-most-widel...